Anthropic Pitches Robots.txt Opt-Out; ABC, SBS Reject It

Anthropic has asked Australia's parliament for a "narrow form of conditional approval" to train AI models on copyrighted material, provided rights holders can block crawlers via robots.txt. The country's two public broadcasters have told the same inquiry the mechanism does not work.

In submissions to the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, reported by The Next Web, SBS wrote that "Robots.txt mechanisms are routinely ignored or bypassed" and that "the onus should be on AI companies to avoid wrongdoing" rather than on publishers to police the open web. SBS also said large language models including ChatGPT and Claude use news content "without permission, attribution or payment."

The ABC framed the imbalance as competition policy. It called the current treatment "anti-competitive" and warned that "this unequal treatment will accelerate the cannibalisation of the Australian news industry." The broadcaster wants AI firms held to the same copyright, defamation, and privacy rules as media outlets.

Australia's government has already rejected a blanket text and data mining exception, and its news bargaining incentive currently covers Facebook, Google, and TikTok but not AI companies. Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both skipping a parallel Senate inquiry, though Anthropic and OpenAI executives are due in Sydney next week; the committee is due to report in November.

Anthropic has turned up in 324 stories we've tracked over the last 90 days, most of them about the company's commercial expansion. This is one of the first where its global policy pitch meets a government that has already shut the door on the broader exception.